June 2021
This special issue of Art History looks closely at the multi-faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’. It brings together a range essays in different formats by artists and art historians to centralize the lack of attention paid to the material and conceptual nature of artworks made by Black British artists, and asks how a reappraisal of their work can contribute to an expanded understanding of modernism.
Dearly Beloved or Unrequited? To Be ‘Black’ in Art’s Histories
The Longest Journey: Black Diaspora Artists in Britain
Constructing a Human World: Denis Williams’s Place in British Modernism of the 1950s
The Photographs of Kim Lim: A Visual Essay
Identity/Alterity Re-De-Constructed in Repetition and Difference
Gavin Jantjes’s Korabra Series (1986): Reworking Museum Interpretation
Fragments: An Exploration of Everyday Black Creativity and Its Relationship to Political Change
Call and Response
Permindar Kaur: Locating a ‘Black’ Artist in Narratives of British Art in the 1990s
Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier: Three Decades, Four Moments
‘Dreaming Has a Share in History’: Biding Time in the Work of Lubaina Himid